Virtual world financial institutions may generally be nothing more than ponzi schemes, but real world financial institutions cheat too. Take the story from today’s NY Times about Countrywide Financial Corporation, which seems to have tried to recoup escrow monies from a mortgage customer using “recreated” letters – letters that seem to have been dated years before they were in fact written. In one case a letter was addressed to the customer’s lawyer at an address he did not move to until after the purported date of the letter. Countrywide’s lawyer seems to have conceded that the letters contained no disclaimers recognising that they had never actually been sent.

Update Jan. 11, 2008: Calculated Risk suggests that it probably did not occur to the person who produced the letters that they “would be construed by any normal person as an implied claim that they had in fact been sent years ago.”